Sidney Altman, a Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry (1989) for his research into RNA catalytic activity, spoke on Monday before an audience of young Skoltech scientists. In an interview given to sk.ru the prominent scientist stressed the importance of cooperation with the Russian biomed startup community.
Sidney Altman, a descendant of Soviet immigrants and MIT graduate, is one of the leading molecular biologists in the US. The 75 year-old Yale professor and Nobel Prize Laureate promotes active cooperation with the Russian scientific community, calling for scientific research to be shielded from political fallout. Sidney Altman is actively involved in a series of research projects in Russia, specifically at the Institute of Chemical Biology and Fundamental Medicine of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.
Sidney Altman speaking at the Skoltech seminar
In an interview given to sk.ru Edward Crawley, the President of Skoltech, was quoted as saying that this scientist is getting more and more involved with various projects at Skoltech. At the moment he is helping the university’s president develop a research strategy both for biomedical research as a whole as well as for several specific fields that the university has prioritized.
“We are devoting a lot of attention to biomedical research, allocating significant resources to biomedical studies, so cooperation with scientists of this level is extremely important for us,” Mr. Crawley stressed. “In such prioritized fields of research as infectious diseases or stem cell research Skoltech tries to rely on cooperation with top researchers such as Sidney Altman, and I would like to stress that Skoltech is increasingly playing the role of a research portal, an institution where leading researchers come to give lectures, work with students and post graduate students and talk with colleagues from Russia and other countries.”
At the seminar, Sidney Altman talked about his scientific research and its practical application in the development of new classes of antibiotics. New antibiotics need to be developed in order to address the problem of the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria that cause common diseases in humans. The scholar talked about how he worked on the development of a completely new class of ribonucleoprotein-based antibiotics that contain the so-called catalytically active RNA. In Mr. Altman’s opinion ribonucleoprotein will soon be used to develop brand new antibiotics for the treatment of some infectious diseases, including malaria. Participants got the chance to put questions to the Nobel Prize laureate as well as to spend some time with him in an informal setting.
An sk.ru correspondent managed to ask Sidney Altman about whether he got a chance to talk to any of the representatives of the biomedical startups operating in the Skolkovo ecosystem and what he thought about them. Mr. Altman replied that, unfortunately, so far he had not had a chance to do that but he would very much like to get more information about them and cooperate with them more closely on biomedical research. He also believes that the very fact that there are so many biomedical startups in Skolkovo and in Russia is a very positive development for our country.